Editorial: Supreme Court finally defines Second Amendment

Talk about a landmark ruling. Thursday morning, the U.S. Supreme Court finally told us what the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution means. We’d only been waiting since 1791, for heaven’s sake.

Talk about a landmark ruling. Thursday morning, the U.S. Supreme Court finally told us what the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution means. We’d only been waiting since 1791, for heaven’s sake.

Here’s what the amendment says: “A well-regulated militia, being necessary for the protection of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

For more than two centuries the debate raged: Were the framers trying to tell us that this right belongs to the states? Or were they saying it belongs to individual, adult citizens? Whole wings of libraries were devoted to books on either side of the argument.

The court managed to avoid handling the hot potato until this term, when it agreed to hear a case involving a security guard’s challenge to Washington, D.C.’s absolute prohibition against its residents owning handguns.

The ban was upheld in federal district court but was overturned by the appeals court.

In the 5-4 decision written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court said the “right to keep and bear arms” is an individual right. In his painstakingly detailed historical analysis, Scalia said the amendment was not written to confer a new right, but to protect an existing right that had developed through the centuries in English law.

The framers, well versed on past attempts of English kings to use their royal militias to disarm potential regional enemies in England, were protecting individual citizens of the newly-organized United States of America against future attempts of governments to disarm them, Scalia said.

Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the dissenters, said the amendment was designed to protect the right of states to raise militias, and to prevent national government from usurping that right. Individual citizens’ gun rights were not an issue for the Framers, Stevens said.

The court’s decision is important as much for what it did not do as for what it did.

Scalia did not strike down reasonable laws and ordinances that regulate ownership and use of firearms. The key word here is reasonable. That’s likely to be debated in scores of lawsuits.

But what we know today as fact is what most Americans have always believed: The Second Amendment means what the second half of it says.